PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2

I may be dovetailing two subjects with only a loose relationship, since my acceptance of the Whitehead term "prehension" (as explained here) came into being about the same time that I started meditating on the hypothetical evolution of what I've labeled as the four literary personas. Nevertheless, I'm going with the conceit.

A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.

In contrast, though, I can imagine-- just as part of a large thought-experiment-- ways in which the four personas might develop diachronically. 

From 2015's COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, here's my last summary definition of how the four personas play off one another in terms of the abstractions they represent, the positive and negative forms of "glory" and "persistence":

The model I've established is one in which heroes and villains alike align themselves with *glory* by championing either the positive or the negative forms of the "idealizing will," while monsters and demiheroes align themselves with *persistence* by pursuing the negative or positive forms of the "existential will."

Prehension may be relevant here as the process by which the two forms of will distinguish themselves, in terms of how such forms of will manifest themselves, first as real human activity and secondarily as the "gestural" literary abstraction of human activity.

Assuming the usual schema for the development of early protohumans-- living in small hunter-gatherer tribes once they've come down from the trees-- then the persona of the *demihero* would have "pride of place." The demihero embodies "positive persistence" insofar as he/she is in essence the persona most concerned with immediate survival. The same need for persistence also determines that the demihero is the figure that is, or at least appears to be, the most thoroughly socialized, because in prehistoric times the tribe is the means by which the individual survives.

The next in line of development then would be "the monster," whatever figure becomes outcast from society. There's no knowing what form of rebellion would give rise to the monster, but it could be anything from an individual rebelling against codes of exogamic marriage to a victim selected as a sacrificial *pharmakon.* The monster is defined by his exclusion from society, and in most if not all his/her forms, he's always "out of place" or "out of step" in some manner.

It's not impossible that other tribes might also contribute to the idea of the monster-persona, but given that a particular tribe cannot really designate a separate tribe as being "outcasts," it's more likely that rival tribes would be the source of the "villain-persona." A given tribe may have to trade with other tribes, particularly in terms of gaining exogamous marital partners, but as long as other tribes can be perceived as a threat, they-- or more probably, their overlords-- would be the ancestors of the villain. 

When a given society faces entities too powerful to be simply cast out after the fashion of the rejected monster, the notion of the hero, the individual able to conquer the most powerful representative of the enemy tribe, is born. The hero may also take partial shape from human being's battles against non-human animals, but in a social sense, the hero is most reified by his rivalry with the villain, where both represent the tribe's greater self-expression to goals of "glory" rather than mere "persistence."

 

 

ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT. 2

Until recently, all of my remarks on ROBINSON CRUSOE have been based on summations and adaptations, for I had not read either Defoe’s famous novel or its four-months-later sequel. In July 2009 I corrected myself on the question as to whether there could be a subcombative (I used the term "noncombative" then) form of the adventure-mythos. From ADDENDA EST:

...on further consideration I did think of a type of adventure-story that could take place in a "noncombative mode:" namely, the so-called "Robinsonade," the subgenre of lost-on-a-desert-island stories that were spawned by the considerable influence of Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE.

I also wrote that there was some "man vs. man" conflict in the first novel, which was correct, though the combat-scenes are rather niggling compared to the novel's emphasis upon Crusoe's efforts to survive and make a comfortable haven on his deserted isle. Today I would still say that it is a novel that aligns largely with the invigorative mode of the adventure-mythos, though the invigorative elements spring from the protagonist's struggles to survive rather than his fairly brief conflicts with cannibals and mutineers.

In 2013's A SHORT HISTORY OF HEROIC FANTASY-ADVENTURE, I touched upon another Defoe work-- which I still have not read today-- as an example of naturalistic adventure.

Examples of such naturalistic adventures include Defoe's 1720 novel CAPTAIN SINGLETON, Walter Scott's breakthrough 1814 historical epic WAVERLY and Schiller's 1781 play THE ROBBERS.  Even some poets began to emulate these more or less naturalistic "swashbuckling" themes, discernible in some of Byron's long poems of the early 19th century, like CHILDE HAROLD (1812) and THE CORSAIR (1814).  And undoubtedly there were many forgotten novels that trod the same basic territory, particularly the anonymously written "highwayman stories" popular in the 1700s. 

In 2014's ADDRESSING DISTRESS PT. 3, I advanced this hypothesis:

....I think 1719 brings a far more credible progenitor for pop culture: Daniel Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE.  In contrast to many of the novels aimed at more educated readers-- those of Swift, Fielding, and Voltaire, for three-- CRUSOE can be read for nothing more than visceral entertainment.  True, the novel has its deeper themes, but I don't think that its perennial popularity rests on them.

To date I have not found a better example of a "progenitor for pop culture" than ROBINSON CRUSOE. It's a little harder, though, to suss out its place in the history of adventure-fiction.

In SHORT HISTORY I cited a Wiki-quote to the effect that the genre of the chivalric romance had fallen out of fashion by 1600. I've heard it said that Edmund Spenser's 1590-96 poetic epic THE FAERIE QUEENE was not popular with contemporaneous reviewers, and this stands in strong contrast to the overwhelming success of Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE in 1605, a work often credited with demolishing the reputation of the chivalric romance. As I look at this list of 17th-century works of repute, I see nothing that does not shout "elite culture," even if certain works, such as the plays of Shakespeare, were apparently popular with the masses. Most of these works, IMO, would align with the other three Fryean mythoi-- drama, irony, or comedy-- but not with adventure. Even Milton's SAMSON AGONISTES, which like the Biblical story ends with Samson exacting a pyrrhic victory over the Philistines, aligns more with drama than with adventure.

 So is ROBINSON CRUSOE not only the first pop-culture novel with broad appeal to the increasingly literate masses, but also the 18th-century's first articulations of the adventure-mythos? It would seem so at present, though both the first book and its sequel are clearly subcombative works, in which some violence takes place but is not arranged to center upon the act of combat. From what I can tell, the 18th century's intellectual currents-- often represented as the "Age of Enlightenment" (1715-89)-- were still too allied to elite culture in order to allow for the invigorative mood of the fully combative adventure.

ROBINSON CRUSOE, in contrast, presents its contemporaneous readers with a picture of a European who has many lesser adventures in which he largely wins out over cannibals, mutineers, and Tartar raiders with his superior firepower, as I attempted to show in the first part of this two-part essay. Based on the way Defoe arranges his scenes of violence, I would say they are characterized more by "struggle" than by "combat." I''m not sure that any single literary work, whether of elite or popular culture, captures the attractions of the combative mode until Walter Scott makes his great breakthrough in the early 19th century with novels like ROB ROY and IVANHOE.

In the first part of CRUSADER I've detailed my problems with Crusoe's character: his priggish piety, his mental isolation from both his pets and fellow humans like Xury and Friday, and his questionable courage. But many of these traits are somewhat more forgivable in a character more defined by "persistence" than by "glory:" that is, a demihero rather than a hero.

In one of my early essays on the distinctions between these personas, I wrote this of the characters of the LOST IN SPACE series, which was perhaps only indirectly modeled on ROBINSON CRUSOE, through the later work SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON:

Despite the family's original purpose of space-exploration, the majority of the castaways-- mother Maureen Robinson, children Judy, Penny, and Will, and the cowardly stowaway Doctor Sniith-- are presented as being far from inclined to fight under most circumstances.  Only two of the male protagonists-- "alpha male" John Robinson and "beta male" Major Don West-- show much competence in the combat department, and even then, Major West only rarely shines as being more than just a "good" fighter.  John Robinson-- played by Guy Williams, the former TV "Zorro"-- is more frequently positioned as an above-average combatant, occasionally even displaying Zorro-style swordfighting skills. Though the Robinsons are portrayed as being willing to go to the wall to save persecuted or put-upon victims from aggressors, they only do so as a last resort, which makes them very different from the concept of the hero as a more active defender of right.

As discussed elsewhere, there is no reason a demihero cannot be a competent combatant, as was certainly the case with John Robinson. But this indirect namesake of Defoe's character is closer in spirit to Crusoe, in that both of them are largely concerned with day-to-day survival rather than with remaking the world.

AUTHORITIES, PLEROTIC AND KENOTIC PART 2

In Part 1 I said, "I'd been giving more thought to the categorization of different types of presences, focal or non-focal, that appear in fiction." To be more specific, while most of my writings here about persona-types have concerned focal presences-- i.e., the stars of whatever stories I'm discussing-- the idea of personas applies just as much to any support-characters. I've touched on these classifications on occasion, though it's occurred to me that it might be enlightening to explore a particular type of supporting-character: the authority-figure who either empowers or initiates the central protagonist (what Vladimir Propp might call the *donor.*)

I did touch on an example of a powerful figure who was not the star of his show in PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES:

Gaiman's work in THE SANDMAN generally rejects the heroism expoused by earlier DC characters who shared the "Sandman" name. Nor is Morpheus alone in being a great ruler who exists largely to police his domain: this principle also applies to the character Lord Emma in LOVE IN HELL, though admittedly he (she?) is a support-character to the starring demiheroes of the series.

As I said in my review of the manga-collection, the two stars of the series are Rintaro, a minor sinner consigned after his death to a lesser form of Hell, and Koyori, the female demon assigned to levy punishment on him. However, Hell itself is a "character" in the story, for most of the narrative deals with Rintaro learning the ropes of an afterlife that looks suspiciously like the life of a living wage-slave. Both Hell and its usually-unseen ruler mirror the quality I've termed elsewhere "positive persistence," and so they, like the protagonists, are also demiheroic.

"Negative persistence," however, dominates the persona of the monster. The monster desires the ordinary life which the demihero usually obtains as a matter of course, but for whatever reason the monster cannot fit into that matrix, and usually either parodies its nature (the vampire, who seeks a new aristocracy of the undead ruling the living) or tears the matrix to pieces in fits of unreasoning rage (Godzilla, the Frankenstein Monster). The persona of the monster can even be attached to entire races of sentient beings who function as monsters to human protagonists: the Martians of H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS are a familiar type, and in the same line are Buck Rogers' nonhuman adversaries, The Tiger Men of Mars.

Villains, however, have a quality of "negative glory" that makes them more pro-active than monsters. I touched on two authority-type villains, both of whom were coterminous with their environments, in ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2:

In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

As for heroes, it's fairly easy to see the heroic virtue of "positive glory" in support-characters like Odin, Lord of Asgard, or Doctor Strange's perceptor The Ancient One. It's perhaps a little harder to conger the mantle of heroism on donor-figures who merely gets the ball rolling, such as the mysterious "Voice" that gives powers to the Hawk and the Dove, or the goddess Rama Kushna in the original DEADMAN story. Still, even if these presences don't do anything more than place the heroes on the path of heroism, they too align with the plerotic value of positive glory.

The same formula applies with respect to donor-figures who initiate heroes but are not sources of numinous authority. This would include types like Mr. Miracle's teacher from the story "Himon," who seems relatively human even though technically he, like the aforementioned Highfather, is a "good New God." Another parallel example is the character of Io from the 2010 film CLASH OF THE TITANS. A new creation with no parallel in the original 1981 film. Io doesn't precisely set Perseus on his heroic path, but she does watch over him from his childhood onward, and she gives him a certain modicum of martial training that aligns her with the figure of the authoritative donor.

OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER PT. 2

In OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER from December 2014, I toyed with the conceit that all of my persona-types could be applied to non-sentient focal presences, addressing a science-fiction tale published by DC Comics story in 1959:

[The story's] focus is the spectacle of an entire world resounding with titanic "tick-tock" sounds, by which planetary doom is averted. This trope loosely aligns the "Tick-Tock World" with the agon of the heroic figure, though I would hesitate to classify this particular focal presence as a "hero."

I'm glad that I added the word "loosely," for the more thought I gave to the matter, the more I came to the conclusion that it was impossible, even in fiction, for a non-sentient presence to be either a hero or a villain. One of my earliest comments on the subject of the persona-types was to the effect that the types I call "heroes" and "villains" were, in Milton's words, "sufficient to stand"-- or to fall, if they so choose. In contrast, the other two types, "monsters" and "demiheroes" are governed by what I've called "existential will," in that they cannot transcend their existence. Further, my association of the "Tick-Tock World's" protective function failed to take into account that the world does not choose to do anything, protective or otherwise; the fact that its physical nature staves off "planetary doom" is merely part of the planet's exotic nature. Therefore, it is as much of a "demihero" as "the Destroyed Earth," the other passive environment discussed in the 2014 essay; the former planet is simply one that manages, even passively, to erect a defense that the other world cannot, much as I've frequently shown sentient demiheroes like Jonathan Harker managing to defend themselves against monsters like Dracula.

And what of the other persona, the monster? Well, I briefly touched on Rene Clair's silent film THE CRAZY RAY for purpose of contrast, saying that, unlike the Destroyed Earth, the focal presence of the Crazy Ray really was the source of "chaos on a global scale," and that in itself would argue a similitude with the persona of the monster. This also applies to other non-sentient phenomena that get out of control, whether they are objects created by man (the mystic statue of the Chimera, seen in this TOMB OF DRACULA story) or have come into being through geologic processes, like the natural wind-tunnel from the serial PERILS OF NYOKA, discussed here. If they possess what I've termed "negative persistence" in excess of their potential for "positive persistence," then they are concepts analogous to monsters; if the converse, they are concepts analogous to demiheroes. Further, most of the "worlds gone wrong" that inhabit science fiction are analogous to monsters, in part because they breed monsters. The Morlocks of Wells' TIME MACHINE and the Mutates born in the film WORLD WITHOUT END-- both discussed here-- would qualify for this persona, as would the Cursed Earth with which Judge Dredd contends in this myth-comics story.

ETHICS AMONG THE SUBCOMBATIVES PT. 2

In Part 1 I noted that even though two unrelated films were both subcombative, they had widely divergent attitudes toward evoking the affect of courage.

I read Mark Twain's 1896 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC for the first time this week, and I was rather surprised to find Twain, the master satirist, delivering the legend of "the Maid of Orleans" with complete seriousness. He only utilizes his trademark humor to delineate some of the side-characters in Joan's dramatic arc, but contrary to my expectations the book was surprisingly affecting.

In terms of the book's plot and main character, it rings in as a subcombative work. Joan herself does not fight, but simply leads her troops to victory up to the middle portion of the book, and the rest of the story is inevitably devoted to her martyrdom at the hands of her political and religious enemies. To be sure, however, there are a handful of strong fight-scenes in the book. Even more surprisingly, Twain endorses a view of Joan's glorious greatness that seems at odds with such down-to-earth Twain characters as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Here's how the POV character-- implicitly speaking for Twain himself, IMO-- sums up the greatness of Joan in Chapter 17, during the ardors of her accusation.

Consider. If you would realize how great Joan of Arc was, remember that it was out of such a place and such circumstances that she came week after week and month after month and confronted the master intellects of France single-handed, and baffled their cunningest schemes, defeated their ablest plans, detected and avoided their secretest traps and pitfalls, broke their lines, repelled their assaults, and camped on the field after every engagement; steadfast always, true to her faith and her ideals; defying torture, defying the stake, and answering threats of eternal death and the pains of hell with a simple "Let come what may, here I take my stand and will abide."

Yes, if you would realize how great was the soul, how profound the wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any land, pagan or Christian.

She was great in battle—we all know that; great in foresight; great in loyalty and patriotism; great in persuading discontented chiefs and reconciling conflicting interests and passions; great in the ability to discover merit and genius wherever it lay hidden; great in picturesque and eloquent speech; supremely great in the gift of firing the hearts of hopeless men and noble enthusiasms, the gift of turning hares into heroes, slaves and skulkers into battalions that march to death with songs on their lips. But all these are exalting activities; they keep hand and heart and brain keyed up to their work; there is the joy of achievement, the inspiration of stir and movement, the applause which hails success; the soul is overflowing with life and energy, the faculties are at white heat; weariness, despondency, inertia—these do not exist.

Yes, Joan of Arc was great always, great everywhere, but she was greatest in the Rouen trials. There she rose above the limitations and infirmities of our human nature, and accomplished under blighting and unnerving and hopeless conditions all that her splendid equipment of moral and intellectual forces could have accomplished if they had been supplemented by the mighty helps of hope and cheer and light, the presence of friendly faces, and a fair and equal fight, with the great world looking on and wondering.

This subcombative work, which recognizes the importance of "exalting activities," makes a marked contrast with Shakespeare's 1602 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. Like JOAN, TROILUS is a work which includes a handful of violent scenes which are not integral to the main arc of the plot. Troilus, unlike Twain's Joan, actually engages in one or two briefly described martial encounters on a battlefield. Yet Shakespeare, who sometimes emphasized the ethic of glory in earlier plays, rejects that ethic firmly in TROILUS, as I noted in my commentary here:

....in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who lets his personal guard the Myrmidons, chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor.

In Part 3 of this new series, I'll explore some of the ramifications involved when a subcombative work aligns itself with themes most often seen in combative works.

PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES

The strongest influence on my theory of the four persona-types has been the work of Schopenhauer, but I'll confess that Northrop Frye's writings on literary dynamis had an impact on the theory, even if I renounced his confusion between dynamis and dynamicity in the essay DYNAMIS AND DYNAMICITY. Frye showed a slight tendency to equate social station with "power of action," probably because he was following Aristotle in his groundbreaking formulations in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

To quickly summarize between the personas of the "hero" and the "demihero," one incarnates the value I've called "positive glory" while the other incarnates that of "positive persistence." I won't repeat the distinctions I've made in earlier essays' I merely revisit this topic to correct my possible tendency to assign the persona of the demihero to the "ordinary man" rather than figures of high social station. (Not that this is a dominant tendency, as seen in some of the characters cited in DEMIHERO RALLIES.) 

Since positive persistence is not really correlated with social station, it's entirely feasible for demiheroes to be not only aristocrats, but rulers of whole domains, who may command considerable forces. However, not all kings and princes function to display "glory," and many function simply to keep their positions stable, a practice which allies with the value of persistence, as much as any of the "ordinary man" protagonists I've touched on.

Within the medium of comic books, one example of a powerful ruler is DC Comics' Morpheus, a.k.a. The Sandman. I've reviewed only two works in Neil Gaiman's corpus of Sand-stories, here and here, and in both of these storylines Morpheus is largely concerned with simply keeping his dream-empire stable for however long the universe lasts. He does undertake a personal duel of sorts in "A Hope in Hell," so he's certainly not without courage. However, for the most part Morpheus does not engage in any form of combat, nor is he concerned with the hero's goals of casting out evil in order to promote good. Thus the Lord of the Dream-World aligns with similar demiheroes who only perform positive actions when pressed to do so, like the LOST IN SPACE characters, to whom I've perhaps devoted the most analysis, starting here.

An example of heroic rulership appears in Nozomu Tamaki's DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND. The "bund" of the title is the domain ruled by Mina Tepes, queen of the world's vampires. Mina, like Morpheus, spends a fair amount of time protecting her empire from incursions, and though she and her retinue are much more violent than Lord Moepheus, the difference between them is more one of their personas than of physical dynamicity.  In the arc titled THE SCARLET ORDER, the origin of the vampire race is revealed, and Tamaki makes this narrative reflect elements of heroic glory:

Vampires are in essence spawned by a mystic force known only as "the Darkness," and its goal is much the same as that of the three vampire-lords from the first arc: to successfully begat a child to perpetuate its heritage. Tamaki's description of the Darkness' methods reminded me somewhat of the Hindu myth of Prajapati, who creates a woman to be his mate. Like Prajapati, the Darkness must then seek to overcome the woman's resistance to spawn the offspring he desires. But the unnamed "Woman" does resist the dark god's purpose, just as Mina resisted the corrupt desires of the three lords, and from the fact of the Woman's defiance springs the history of the vampire race.

By comparison, Gaiman's work in THE SANDMAN generally rejects the heroism expoused by earlier DC characters who shared the "Sandman" name. Nor is Morpheus alone in being a great ruler who exists largely to police his domain: this principle also applies to the character Lord Emma in LOVE IN HELL, though admittedly he (she?) is a support-character to the starring demiheroes of the series.

Interestingly, very few American-made superheroes have any propensity to be rulers, whether due to aristocratic birth or simply taking power by force of will. Thus they must be seen as "ordinary men" who make the transition to heroic status, which only shows that even characters who start out as demiheroes can feel the demands of "noblesse oblige."

COMBAT PLAY PT. 4

As the Nietzsche citation in Part 3 should make clear, the philosopher believed in the principle of mastery, or "overcoming" (German *uberwindung*) as a necessary aspect of the human spirit. At the same time, he believed more profoundly that the possessor of a "master morality" should also practice *selbstuberwindung,* usually translated as "self-overcoming." As I observed here, Nietzsche expressed a marginal preference for the corrupt, real-life Cesare Borgia over the simon-pure fictional character Parsifal, essentially because Parsifal had no real "self" to be overcome. For similar reasons, Nietzsche expressed disgust at those whom he deemed adherents of "slave morality" because he felt that they weren't really any more free from the impulse of aggression than the representatives of "master morality." Rather, adherents of "slave morality" merely projected the illusion of self-mastery. Only those who consciously admitted the allure of mastery, of wielding power over others, had any true capacity for self-overcoming.

In other segments of COMBAT PLAY I've sought to provide somewhat more personal motives for advocating the importance of combat-fantasies, and for arguing that they can represent "positive compensation" when dealing with the travails of ordinary life. I would add-- without bringing in all the Hegelian arguments about the nature of freedom-- that it's psychically necessary for any individual human to feel as if he or she can, as the occasion demands, fight back against oppression of any kind. At the same time, the notion of "fair play" becomes important within the sphere of fiction and fantasy, possibly more important than it can ever be in the real world of political negotiation and compulsion. In my own lit-critic cosmos, the ideal of "fair play" assumes the role of "self-limitation" that is, in Nietzsche's philosophy, occupied by "self-overcoming." Clearly the importance of this concept has led me to author essays like this one, where my main concern is to account for certain pop-culture figures, such as the Golden Age Spectre, who seem to know little if any "self-limitation." In the original series, whose tone was set by scripter Jerry Siegel, there's no question that the Spectre is positioned as a hero-- and yet only occasionally does this hero encounter opponents able to wield forces equal to his own.

In the aforesaid essay DECIDEDLY SEEKING SYMMETRY, I argued that occasional heroes who worked without the limitations of the "fair play" were a "natural, and probably inevitable, counterpoint" to the statistically dominant type of hero who tends to meet his foes on a level playing-field. I say that it's inevitable because it's the nature of affective freedom that individual authors can diverge from any statistically dominant model of a given concept, be it "the hero" or anything else. The model I've established is one in which heroes and villains alike align themselves with *glory* by championing either the positive or the negative forms of the "idealizing will," while monsters and demiheroes align themselves with *persistence* by pursuing the negative or positive forms of the "existential will."  But the existence of this model, while statistically dominant, does not prevent individual creators from diverging from it. For whatever reasons, Jerry Siegel conceptualized the Spectre as having such near-omnipotence that he could "overcome" most of his villains without the limitations of fair play. I wasn't entirely serious in SYMMETRY when I labeled such heroes as "sadists," for a true sadist would not possess the Spectre's empathy toward ordinary humans oppressed by mortal evildoers. That empathy, as well as the determination to better the world through the positive form of the idealizing will, still qualifies the Spectre as a hero. Later versions of the Spectre conformed to the dominant model, giving the Ghostly Guardian more high-energy foes to combat. But had the character never appeared anywhere but in his Golden Age adventures, I might have to view him as a "subcombative superhero," in that only rarely did the original Spectre combat megadynamic entities like himself.

By the same parallel, the nature of affective freedom also makes it possible for individual authors to diverge from the statistically dominant model of "the monster." In contrast to the hero, the monster often appears as the sole megadynamic entity in his universe, and his opponents, usually demiheroes, are not usually able to stand against him. In SYMMETRY I mentioned Freddy Krueger as an exception to this rule, in that the majority of his films end when another megadynamic entity-- usually the so-called "final girl"-- manages to defeat the dastardly dream-creature with her own display of dynamicity.

However, a better-known example would probably the combative relationship between the starring monsters of the original ALIENS film-franchise and their most "persistent" demihero-enemy, Ellen Ripley. Ripley starts out as a typical demihero, and in her first appearance she only manages to stave off the assault of one monstrous extraterrestrial by getting him in the right place for his elimination, rather than beating him one-and-one.

In the second film, however, Ripley resorts to mechanical aid to fight a Queen Alien on its own terms, and even though Ripley loses that battle and must once more trick the creature into defeat, the narrative places far more emphasis on Ripley as a megadynamic figure.

Though the character also does not directly defeat any Aliens in the last two films in the original franchise either, Ripley continues to display a megadynamic formidability, so that she is, unlike most monster-victims, a combative demihero. The fact that the Aliens' most prominent human foe can fight them back doesn't alter their persona as monsters, but their divergence sets them slightly to one side of the dominant model for monsters, just as Original Spectre's divergence sets him slightly to one side of the dominant hero-model.

GOALS, OR ROLES?

In 2012's THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PT. 2  I ended the essay thusly:

As a closing clarification, I am not saying that concrete goal-affects do not appear in hero-villain narratives.  Maybe the Joker sends Batman a mocking note so that Batman will come chase him, but clearly the Penguin would rather get away with the loot rather than tilt with the Caped Crusader again.  But the act of reading about Batman's struggles with both types of villains is in itself an example of an "abstract goal-affect," since the pleasures we derive from reading fiction cannot be said to promote either gain or safety in a direct relationship.

I have the general habit of recalling fragments of stuff I've written and wondering whether or not it fits into the overall schema-- which, I have no doubt, is the same way synoptic critics like Frye and Fiedler also work, since no system springs out of anyone's head a la Athena. I became concerned as to whether this statement had overemphasized the role of "goals" within the diegesis of a given story-- say, a Batman vs. Penguin story-- and had thus come into conflict with the principles stated in HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN W/O IDENTITY:

 Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

By that principle, the Penguin too is a fictional construct, and though he's been constructed so that he does possess what I called "concrete goal-affects" within his own diegesis, he's defined more by his "role" as a fictional construct than by his "goal" as an actual willing subject, since he isn't one. Unless one of the raconteurs working on him re-defines his roal, the Penguin is defined by the abstract affects of villainous glory than by getting gold, jewels, etc.

Parenthetically, something like this did happen at one point with the Riddler. In some Bat-universe stories-- I can only attest to a story-arc in GOTHAM CITY SIRENS-- the Riddler reforms and becomes a private detective. For all I know the character may have turned back to crime by now, but during that arc he ceased to be a villain as such, though it's debatable as to whether he then assumed the role of "hero" or "demihero."

Fortunately, a quick survey of some of my writings on "persona-types" and the forms of will they incarnate don't seem to place undue emphasis upon the diegetic motives of characters, and I see that in ESTRANGED SPORTS STORIES I did stress "role" over "goal:"

 ...it's the intent behind the narrative, not the conscious intent of the protagonist, that denotes the nature of his persona.

This observation helps me out with a related problem I've been considerering recently. I've defined the monster-persona against the hero-persona as one relating to whether or not their primary role emphasized the "idealizing will" or "the existential will"-- two terms I devised after I wrote this passage in MONSTERS, DEMIHEROES AND OTHER WILLING BEASTS, and which I've interpolated in place of the original, now outdated terms:

King Kong, Gamera and Godzilla may follow the plots of heroes in these assorted works, but I assert that in terms of fundamental character they still represent "existential will," while the not much more intelligent Hulk represents "idealizing will."

But the concept of "existential will" is harder to sell when the monsters are clearly intelligent human beings, like my sometime examples of Doctor Moreau and Victor Frankenstein. Still, I've argued that their obsessions, even if they are motivated by a desire for glory, are subsumed by the "intent behind the narrative." Unlike a genuine glory-oriented villain like Fu Manchu, the two monstrous mad scientists embody the quality of "negative persistence" as much as do big hulking monsters like Kong and Godzilla.

Similarly, because of my tendency to identity Sadean activity as examples of Bataillean expenditure rather than acquisition-- probably best summarized here-- I find myself thinking twice regarding two monsters who are very popular for their overt Sadean qualities.

The first is Freddy Kreuger of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST series. He's become popular, I'm convinced, not because he's a nasty child molester (if indeed that was the intention in the original series) but because he stalks and slays his victims with an imaginative panache atypical of the average slasher-monster.

The second is Pinhead of the HELLRAISER film-series. He doesn't warp his infernal domain quite as flamboyantly as Freddy does with his dream-worlds. But he incarnates the idea of suffering as Sadean glory, and so he does have a highly imaginative "ideal" behind his depradations that is foreign to most monsters.

But in both cases, the narrative's intent supersedes Freddy's snarky cleverness and Pinhead's cerebral viciousness. Their obsessions imprison them far more than do those of the great villains like the aforementioned Fu Manchu, and so I can still align them more with the quality of persistence than with glory.

Perhaps a useful distinction also arises from the concept of "paired opposites' I've formulated: to wit, "hero is to villain as monster is to victim (or, more formally, 'demihero.'"  The monster is designed to prey on a victim who is usually weaker than he, although in many cases the demihero may "step up" and conquer the monster through strength, guile, or a combination thereof. The villain may be just as obsessed as the monster, but characters like the Joker and Lex Luthor-- who make rather good comic-book parallels to Freddy and Pinhead-- are always oriented on challenging heroes, often despite having been beaten by said heroes on many, many occasions. That kind of glory may have only negative consequences, but it's still the same glory we descry in Milton's fallen Lucifer.

On a closing note, I've read that Pinhead has recently been executed by his creator Clive Barker in the world of prose. Pinhead did not appear in the last HELLRAISER film, which I have not seen, and it seems unlikely that Doug Bradley will essay the role again, any more than Robert Englund will again play Freddy, after publicly claiming that he would not do so. I personally won't mind if the characters never appear in film again--

But the crossover-loving part of me wishes that someone could engineer a comic-book meeting between Freddy and Pinhead, one worthy of their respective forms of sadistic nastiness. True, one such comic-book crossover I reviewed here  turned out awful. But the idea of a good writer managing to do justice to both Freddy's American wisecracks and Pinhead's dry Brit humor is a tempting one indeed-- though admittedly, not tempting enough to make any Faustian bargains.

JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 5

In order to expand somewhat on Bataille's "two types of economic consumption," I present this quote from Bataille's 1957 book EROTISM. Keep in mind that when Bataille speaks of "violence," he's also states in the same work that he considers sexual activity to belong to a subset of violence.

In the domain of our life [the principle of] excess manifests in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behavior where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome [these impulses] a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment.

In Part 4  I drew parallels between the principle of play and stories of thematic escapism, as well as between the principle of work and stories of thematic realism. The author who pursues the course of thematic realism also pursues a course like the "deferred gratification" Bataille describes above. He does not just write or draw whatever gives him pleasure in "the present moment," nor does he orient his creative activity toward the "instant gratification" of his audience's desires for sensuous frenzy.  The realist represses some of the pure pleasure of creation in order to communicate some rhetorical point, though only an inferior realist allows his principle of work to subsume his principle of play.

The thematic escapist author, however, is free within the same limitations as the aforementioned "games" and "feast days." These celebratory practices unleash some of the energies of excess, though never all of them without restriction.  A tribal festival may allow a member of the tribe to eat and drink as much as he wants, and the tribe may even turn a blind eye if he enjoys a little fuckery of which society would not normally approve (I'm thinking here of Steinbeck's description of the casual liaisons that cropped up during camp-meetings ostensibly devoted to right Christian worship). But I doubt that most tribal festivals give participants the leeway to rape or kill anyone they want. Games are even more circumscribed in terms of the ways they allow players to expend their energies.

Still, "work" implies steady, productive activity while "play" implies sudden bursts of frenzied activity with no definite purpose. This suggests a parallel with the terms for the goal-affects as I finally articulated them in EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 2.  "Persistence" is the primary motivation of those who either already have a status quo existence or of those who desire that existence. "Glory," on the other hand, is the primary motivation of those devoted to abstract ideals, and who pursue those ideals beyond the bounds of personal advantage. Thus in THE ILIAD Achilles describes the choice of two contradictory fates which he, and by implication every human being, must make:

"Mother tells me,the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,that two fates bear me on to the day of death.If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,my pride, my glory dies. . . ." (Book 9).

With these parallels in mind, I return to the topic of the kinetic effects, sex and violence. PART 3 takes pains to establish that in both their pure and mixed states they can be used for purposes of *megalothymic* self-aggrandizement or of *isothymic* self-leveling. When I reviewed the four examples of pure and mixed states I listed in LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION, I determined that only the example used for "non-violent sex" could be considered entirely *megalothymic."  However, SWAMP THING #34 is just as much an example of "play for play's sake" as the other three examples. Though there is a nice rhetorical point to be made about the leveling of distinctions between human being and plant-elemental, the tenor of the story is dominated by the principle of play, by sensuous frenzy.

In Part 4 I addressed my questions about the relations of work and play to both escapist and realistic narratives, and as it happened I chose to make the common element of all four examples the political topic of Caucasian-Negro relations. But it should go without saying that the same breakdown could apply to the use of kinetic elements as easily as it does to other forms of content.

In terms of pure merit, I think that the Moore/Bissette/Totelbein "Rites of Spring" achieves as much as any "non-violent sex" story possibly could, within the sphere of a fundamentally escapist work.
However, the example I gave in the TRANSGRESSION essay for "violent sex," taken from Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, does not achieve comparable merit for this type of story.

Granted, Miller's overall story is not centrally about sex, as is the Swamp Thing story. Still, in all of the TDKSA scenes that involve Wonder Woman, Miller's consistently characterizes Wonder Woman as the ultimate frustrated female, a "bitch on the rag" if you will.

So if I had chosen to wtite PART 4 as if I were evaluating all the examples in terms of being either good or bad "play for play's sake," then that particular Moore Swamp Thing story would take the place of Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND, while that particular Miller Batman story would take the place of THE CLANSMAN.

Of course, it should go without saying that both of these authors have produced assorted good and bad works dealing with sex, violence, race and almost any other content one might seek to isolate.

It also follows that there must also exist meritorious or un-meritorious stories with any of the two pure states and the two mixed states described in TRANSGRESSION. But I doubt that I will list them all, as I conceive these essays as a prelude to a larger and more involved project, possibly to be entitled CHARTING THE LINES OF LAW.

JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 2

To the best of my ability to remember a stray thought from a year and half ago, here's what I've come up with regarding the following:

I have some thoughts as to how these categories of goal-affect might relate to Frank Fukuyama's categories of "thymos:" *megalothymia* and *isothymia.*  But these will be elaborated in a separate essay.

Since the goal-affects I've formulated are "glory," which I usually associate with competition, and "persistence," which I usually associate with cooperative existence, I may have been on the verge of making the comparisons of "glory= megalothymia" and "persistence=isothymia." It should go without saying that I always apply such formulas primarily to art and literature, though that's not to say that they lack any parallels to "real life."

But I'm glad I didn't make such a one-on-one comparison, because the categories are too complex for such parallelism.

Fukuyama introduces his terms as an analysis of the broad motivations behind human actions, pointing out that *thymos,* "spiritedness," can arise in comparable ways from the attempt of an individual to exceed others or from the attempt of an individual to promote others to obtain rights, privileges, etc., that others enjoy.  Fukuyama, as I've stipulated before, says nothing about applying these motivations to the creators of art and literature; all of these extrapolations are mine.

In contrast, while I grounded my concepts of the goal-affects "glory" and "persistence" in philosophical observations about "real life" as formulated by Hobbes and Schopenhauer, I formulated these categories for the purpose of analyzing literary constructs.  Such constructs have a logic that is often extrapolated from real experience but has its roots in the freedom of the mind from reality, as I asserted in LET FREEDOM RIDE PT. 4:

...art is fundamentally about play, even when that play is turned to the purpose of utilitarian work.

Fukuyama, though he's oriented upon the realities of political life, shows an admirable understanding of the many-faceted nature of his categories.  *Megalothymia* can manifest both in the concert pianist seeking to be "the best" through competition with his equals, but it can also manifest in a tyrant like Stalin or Pol Pot, whose ideas of "excellence" are confined to slaughtering hordes of defenseless peoples to intimidate the living. *Isothymia* can manifest as Nelson Mandela going to jail for years to promote equal standards for Black Africans, but it can also manifest in "men without chests," endlessly prating about "equity" regardless of any other considerations.

Now, literary constructs must and will reflect all these facets, but their behavior is an extension of their authors' will; they reflect what they consider good or bad. In a strange way, literary characters are "un-free" so that their audiences may obtain a wider understanding of the nature of freedom (also discussed in the previous citation).

Thus audiences can admire how well a given character, even if he or she is evil, incarnates a particular goal-affect. I devoted this essay to specifying the different ways in which the villainous Fu Manchu and the monstrous Victor Frankenstein incarnate the affects of "glory" or of "persistence" respectively. The same essay also references differing goal-affects in characters who are meant to be dominantly sympathetic: the respective ensembles of the TV shows LOST IN SPACE ("persistence") and THE LOST WORLD ("glory.")  An overly politicized critic could foolishly align both of the negative figures with the negative aspect of *megalothymia,* because they kill or tyrannize, and the teleseries-heroes with the positive aspect of *isothymia,* because these heroes are sometimes seen protecting the weak or innocent. However, that would be a correlation informed too much with the very sort of "either-or" utilitarianism to which my system is opposed.

Having shown some ways in which Fukuyama and the goal-affect theory do not correlate, the next essay will consider a Bataillean approach to the goal-affects.

HERO VS. ANTIHERO VS. DEMIHERO

The term "antihero," which dates back to 1714, is defined thusly on Wikipedia:

 a leading character in a film, book or play who lacks the traditional heroic qualities

My concept of the "demihero" will probably never supplant this better-known formulation, but in my essays I've tried to show that "heroic qualities" can appear in all four of my persona-types, as can "unheroic qualities"-- which in this case would probably parallel other paired concepts in my system, ranging from "life-affirming forces/life-denying forces," "glory/persistence," or "idealizing will/existential will." In THE COMPLICATIONS OF COMEDY PT. 2 I noted the intermixing of the "positive" and the "negative" in Marvel's "unheroic hero," The Punisher:

It's less typical for focal heroes to have negative manifestations.  Marvel Comics' Punisher would probably be one example, in that his obsession to eradicate crime, though certainly larger-than-life, is rooted in his personal animus rather than in concern for life.  The Punisher does end up supporting the forces of life, but he's not always admired for his persistence, so that he ends up becoming a quasi-villain in the features of other Marvel heroes like Daredevil and Captain America, or getting beat up by Batman in a throwaway scene of JLA/AVENGERS.

An even better example of this intermixed quality appears in a novel I recently reviewed on my book-and-comics review site OUROBOROS DREAMS: the character of Hell Tanner, the hero of Roger Zelazny's 1969 DAMNATION ALLEY. In part I wrote:

Zelazny isn't simply glorifying the type of antihero that became fashionable in the 1960s.  Although Hell is a son of a bitch, he begins to have a very unsentimental appreciation for the magnitude of his task...

This appreciation appears in this excerpt from Hell Tanner's thoughts about his mission:

 Nobody had ever asked him to do anything important before, and he hoped that nobody ever would again. Now, though, he was taken by the feeling that he could do it. He wanted to do it. Damnation Alley lay all about him, burning, fuming, shaking, and if he could not run it, then half the world would die, and the chances would be doubled that one day all the world would be part of the Alley.

Now, going by the Wikipedia definition-- and by the generally lax way that the term "antihero" is tossed around-- one could judge Hell Tanner to be an "antihero," simply because he "lacks the traditional heroic qualities." Indeed, I have seen two online reviews of the novel that use the term. However, I think that even though Tanner has any number of negative aspects, his heroic ones dominate the unheroic (or demiheroic) ones.  The passage cited above is not the sort of thought one would find in the heads of characters usually out only for themselves, indicating to me that author Zelazny wanted to delve into deeper waters. He seems to have wanted to put a vicious son-of-a-bitch in the position of acting heroically even though he has no sentimental regard for society or its members. Like the Punisher, Tanner is a hero who affirms life even though he may choose at any time to kill or maim anyone he doesn't like. 

The reverse is seen in the case of the cinematic Rick Deckard of Ridley Scott's 1982 BLADE RUNNER. In this essay I gave my reasons for regarding this Deckard as a combative demihero. Through a Google search I've seen many online sources regard Deckard as an "antihero," but in my opinion the use of this term blurs a crucial distinction between Deckard and Tanner: that the former is motivated only by the quality of "persistence"-- that is, of making sure that he and his immediate loved ones can survive-- while the latter is motivated by the quality of "glory," that of doing something great even though it defies the logic of survival.

ESTRANGED SPORTS STORIES

For the purpose of another essay on the narrative function of violence in works about sports, promised at the end of this essay, I'll resort once more to this passage from an even earlier essay:

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority.-- VIOLENCE *AIN'T* NUTHIN' BUT SEX MISSPELLED, PART 2.

The majority of sports-narratives, while they may deal with risks to life and limb, do not normally emphasize battles to the death.  Opponents who simply pit their skills against one another in a distanced manner, as in the various forms of racing, are not supposed to battle one another at all. Opponents who pit their skills against one another directly, as in boxing, are expected to fight within certain limits that keep the violence at a non-lethal level.  The term "blood sports" has been coined for those sports that increase the risks for participants, be they animal or human, so that the opponents not only fight but shed blood and so put their very lives at risk within the context of a direct fight.

Needless to say, almost all of these struggles do involve "proving thymotic superiority," whether they are in the direct or the distanced mode of competition.  Even purely intellectual board-games like chess involve one opponent proving superiority over another, and even in sparring matches, where the only purpose is to measure one's skills, both participants want to do their best, i.e., to win.  At the moment I can think of only one sequence, from a MASTER OF KUNG FU comic, in which duelists Shang-Chi and Leiko engage in a fluid kung-fu fight in which the participants are tranquilly above all personal striving as they exchange moves in a balletic exercise.  Most sparring-bouts, however, are all about the win, like this one:

In PROPPING PONDERINGS PT. 2 my concern was to show the contrast between Propp's categories for heroic personas, the "seeker" and the "victimized hero," with respect to two futuristic
sports-narratives, THE RUNNING MAN (1987) and THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989).  I determined that the heroes of these respective sports-films were both "seekers," even as the heroic ensembles I compared in this essay were both "victimized heroes."  Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but in these essays my major aim has been to show that my two types of will transcend Propp's categories, as well as my own roughly related categories of "hero" and "demihero." At the end of PONDERINGS PT 2 I said that I would draw yet another hero-demihero contrast.  This one is devoted to sports-protagonists who, unlike Ben Richards and the Juggers, get drawn into extraneous life-and-death struggles while just trying to make a go of their particular sport.

At first SPEED RACER might seem to line up with what I've written of other demiheroes, for his main purpose in life is not to battle evil but to win races with his "powerful Mach 5." Nevertheless, it's the intent behind the narrative, not the conscious intent of the protagonist, that denotes the nature of his persona. And Speed, rather like the castaway-heroes of the 1999-2002 teleseries THE LOST WORLD, constantly plays the role of a greasemonkey Galahad, pitting his personal fighting skills and the fabulous gadgets of his race-car against a rogue's gallery of crooks, spies, assassins, and so on. I confess that because only a tiny amount of the original manga has been translated, I can only judge SPEED RACER from the translated TV cartoon, but I don't imagine there's a great deal of disconnect between the original manga and the anime.  Speed may be all that Speed *thinks* he needs, but viewers recognize that he functions to mount impromptu crusades against evil at the drop of a hat, rather than worrying about his personal survival.

The teleseries POKEMON, another work adapted from a Japanese anime whose manga-versions I have not read, has always been a tough nut for me to categorize. At times I felt tempted to term its Fryean mythos to be one of "comedy," given the general appearance of protagonist Ash Catchem and his various Poke-animal allies.  But I resisted this, and eventually formulated the rule that "having a "cute" or "funny" appearance-- as is the case with Underdog, Plastic Man, and the Adam West Batman-- does not necessarily denote that the character's adventures must fall into any of the "funny" categories," as demonstrated here.  I finally determined that the general context of the TV show's narrative-- which regularly involve Catchem pitting his Pokémon-critters against other Poke-antagonists, in generally bloodless matches-- falls into the mythos of adventure.

Still, unlike Speed Racer, Ash really does seem fixated first and foremost on his competitions.  Whenever adventure calls him to put himself or his beasties in harm's way, he does so out of a generalized sense of good will toward others.  But there is in my view no sense of "glory" in his actions, as there is the actions of Speed Racer.  Ash's adventures follow the pattern I described in EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT 3 with regard to the teleseries LOST IN SPACE:

Though the Robinsons are potrayed as being willing to go to the wall to save persecuted or put-upon victims from aggressors, they only do so as a last resort, which makes them very different from the concept of the hero as a more active defender of right.  For this reason I find that the tenor of the Space Family Robinson's adventures is concerned with "persistence" first and "glory" second if at all.

So, in symmetry with PONDERINGS 2, both of these follow Propp's structure of "victimized heroes," but Speed Racer's narrative nonetheless emphasizes the "idealizing will" that manifests in "glory," while Ash Catchem's belongs to the "existential will" that manifests in "persistence."

PROPPIAN PONDERINGS PT. 2

"I don't like brutality.  I like heroics. I like the blood of heroes."-- THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989)


In this essay I review-compared the 1987 film THE RUNNING MAN with the 1989 film THE BLOOD OF HEROES.  Both are films about violent futuristic sports. The first story is literally a "bloodsport"-- one in which the main player is supposed to be killed by the game-- while the second tale is more comparable to modern-day sports stories, in which players may be expected to wreak great violence upon one another in order to win, but not to kill one another.  The first is centered upon one centric hero, a "Ben Richards" (Arnold Schwarzenegger), whose few allies do not share the main stage with him.  The second revolves more around the fortunes of a team that plays the futuristic "Game," which I described as "a combination of football, hockey, and gladiatorial combat."  However, only two of the players, "Kidda" (Joan Chen) and "Sallow" (Rutger Hauer) are centric characters, with their fellow players functioning as support-cast.

Neither the solo-hero Richards nor the ensemble-team of Kidda and Sallow are unambiguous examples of Vladmir Propp's "seeker" function, which Propp defined along these lines: "if a young girl is kidnapped,,,, and if Ivan goes off in search of her, then the hero of the tale is Ivan and not the kidnapped girl.  Heroes of this type may be termed seekers." 

With respect to RUNNING MAN's Richards, the hero is initially not "seeking" to overthrow the corrupt government of his future world.  I've commented that, in contrast to Stephen King's novel, Richards' "light bulb" realization that The Repressive Government Is Bad does not prove credible and seems to be just a tired device to make film-audiences identify with Richards.  Though Richards has risen to the position as the pilot of the police department's helicopter, he's genuinely shocked when his bosses tell him to shoot down civilians.  One might observe that Richards is "victimized" for this action by being sentenced to prison-- which sentence eventually leads him to be recruited by the "Running Man" game-show.  Still, the character's act of disobedience is meant to signal his innate heroism.  In prison, prior to being recruited by the game-show, Richards encounters some members of a resistance group that does wish to overthrow the evil government.  At first he sneers at the rebels, and his words sound like those of a demihero: "I'm not into politics. I'm into survival."  But his actions bely these words: the villain Killian is only able to coerce Richards into entering the game by threatening the lives of the rebels.  And of course Richards' triumphant conquests of the various "Running Man" executioners are part and parcel of the normative image of the adventure-hero.  Thus, though RUNNING MAN is far from being the best example of this hero-type-- in fact, it's pretty crappy next to inspired efforts like Schwarzenegger's TOTAL RECALL-- it still displays the pattern of a "seeker" type of hero, who in turn represents the "idealizing will."

The team of "juggers" in BLOOD OF HEROES really are primarily concerned with survival, at least at the outset.  And also in contrast to RUNNING MAN, there's never any suggestion that they can do anything to alter the political status quo of their futuristic world.  Rutger Hauer's character Sallow is, as I note in my review, the old pro with the tragic past. Long ago he was feted in the big cities, but he offended the aristocrats and so found himself playing his game in rude "dog-towns."  In contrast, the considerably younger character Kidda covets what Sallow lost.  Once she manages to join Sallow's team, she convinces him to return to one of the cities that exiled him, to challenge the professional players in the "Big Leagues."  Kidda hopes to be noticed by League scouts so that she can reap the financial rewards of professionalism.  Sallow, however, is motivated more by his own past grievances, not any practical considerations.  Not only does he not expect to overthrow the aristocracy, he also has no illusions of regaining his lost social status.  But when the professionals accept the challenge, the Game, not its financial rewards, becomes paramount in their minds. Kidda becomes the focus of the game at its climax, since her function is to make the equivalent of a dramatic "touchdown."  Though Kidda has no dialogue during this sequence, the tension of the scene suggests that even in her the spirit of the sport has triumphed over motives of financial advancement.

That said, even if I find Sallow and Kidda to conform to Propp's notion of "the seeker"-- since they certainly aren't forced to challenge the establishment-- they remain representations of "the existential will."  The same admixture of "idealizing will" and "existential will" also appears in my earlier examples LOST IN SPACE and LOST WORLD, and this is consistent with what I wrote on this theory in APES AND ANGELS 2:

I should have said earlier that these two forms of will, these "two souls" that seem to dwell in every human's breast, only appear in fictional characters to the extent that their creators choose to emphasize one or both.  It is possible to have characters who are purely devoted to glorious ideals, or purely devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence.  It is also possible to have combinations of the two, but one form of will must dominate over the other, by the same logic I pursued in JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY and other essays with regard to the admixture of mythos-elements in a given work.

This will probably be all that I have to say for the present on Propp's categories, though I anticipate at least one more essay on the topic of "sports heroes" and "sports demiheroes."



 

PROPPIAN PONDERINGS PT. 1

Though I've sustained some limited influence from Vladimir Propp, I've only referred to him in three essays so far-- here, here, and here-- and I didn't include him among my TWELVE PILLARS OF WISDOM.

On one level, I admire the simplicity of his attempt to study folklore-personae as "functions," which led to this pellucid generalization on the nature of folkloric protagonists:

The hero of the tale may be one of two types: (1) if a young girl is kidnapped,,,, and if Ivan goes off in search of her, then the hero of the tale is Ivan and not the kidnapped girl.  Heroes of this type may be termed seekers. (2) If a young girl or boy is seized or driven out, and the thread of the narrative is linked to his or her fate and not to those who remain behind, then the hero of the tale is the seized or banished boy or girl. There are no seekers in such tales.  Heroes of this variety may be called victimized heroes.-- Vladimir Propp, MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE, p. 36.

On another level, I've been less enthusiastic about his manifestation of what I call the "recipe mentality," and in the last of the three essays I stated my credo:

 the Proppian distinction doesn’t capture the difference in character-attitude, which might be fairly deemed a failure of Propp’s analysis

Years ago on some comics-forum I did "feel out" the idea as to whether one could divide pop-fictional heroes by whether they were proactive, like Propp's "seeker," or reactive, like Propp's "victimized hero." This was long before I coined my term "demihero," but even then, I was looking for some method to separate protagonists who looked for trouble from those who simply coped with trouble when it came their way.  Yet following Propp in his concentration on plot-elements alone proved to be a dead end. In this essay I gave an example of two sets of "victimized heroes"-- the respective casts of two teleserials, 1965'S LOST IN SPACE and 1999's THE LOST WORLD.  I demonstrated that despite similarities of continuing plot-situations, the "goal-affects" of the first series represented the affect of "persistence" while the second series represented the affect of "glory."

When I wrote the EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS series of essays, I had not yet formulated my terms for the type of "will" represented by each affect.  I formulated these terms a few months later in APES AND ANGELS.  If I had, I would have said, in addition to terming the LOST IN SPACE crew "demiheroes" and the LOST WORLD group "heroes," that each represented respectively the "existential will" and the "idealizing will."

The converse of course would be equally true.  Though the term "seeker" sounds like the sort of protagonist who actively seeks trouble, it's just as possible to posit a seeker who represented the dyad "persistence/existential will" as the dyad "glory/idealizing will."  Indeed, one of my recent dual-reviews of two films with loosely similar topics supplied just such an opposition, which I'll discuss more fully in Part 2.

REACH VS. GRASP

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?

This famous quote from Robert Browning's ANDREA DEL SARTO applies reasonably well to the distinctions I've been elaborating with regard to DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY.

In a literary world the idea of a character possessing a certain capacity to "reach" for goals and, in theory, to bring them into one's compass compares with the narrative value of *dynamicity.*

"Grasp," however, is a limitation imposed upon the capacity to reach for goals, implicitly from "outside" the subject's compass. In my critical system this aligns with the significant value of the *dynamis* applied to either a narrative's plot or its central character(s).  This significant value, quantified via the term "stature," is assessed by means of determining the Fryean mythos with which the plot and characters align, while characters alone are further determined by what I called "persona-stature" in this essay.

"Reach," in contrast, I quantify in terms of the dynamicity-ratings, which I examined last in this essay. In that essay I dealt with the problem that even all characters rated as "x-types" could not be equal.  Obviously "Dream Girl" is not as powerful in a physical sense as most of the other Legionnaires.  Yet because her predictive power can be used strategically, to extend the "reach" of the Legion's adventures and their control over circumstances, her "reach" is equal to theirs, and so has the same narrative function.

In comic narratives, the adventures are meant to have comic stature, and so a hero's ability to display power may have the same "reach" as that of an adventure-hero, but his "grasp" will be very different.  Sometimes powerful heroes win conflicts largely by luck, as is usually the case with the Inferior Five.  Sometimes they win purely through superior dynamicity, even as adventure-heroes do, as we see with Popeye or Ranma Saotome.  Yet in comedies the means by which the hero triumphs are less important than they are in adventure-narratives, because for comedies the essential point is to be amusing in some way, rather than to provoke excitement.

In various essays on this blog I've cited other ways in which the narrative's mythos-affiliation affects a focal character's *dynamis.*  I haven't used *dynamis* as much to apply to the four personas, but as I've established that they are governed by the "outside expectations" of the audience, the term applies no less to the personas than to the nexus of plot and character described by Frye's mythoi.

In the EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS series I devoted considerable space to outlining the ways in which various personas differed from one another in terms of the types of "will" they incarnated: first contrasting positive hero-figures with positive demihero-figures in PT. 3 and then a negative villain-figure with a negative monster-figure in PT. 4.  But I didn't explore any of them in terms of dynamicity or dynamis.

The term "monster" is almost as ambiguous as "hero," since the former can applied to characters who fully incarnate the stature of the hero-persona, as with the Thing.

In this sense, the Thing "monster" status does not speak to the type of will he incarnates: only to his physical appearance.  However, the Man-Thing can be deemed a monster in terms of both physical appearance and his persona.  The Man-Thing acts as one generally expects a monster to act, perpetrating acts of self-preservation, leavened with bursts of unreasoning hostility.  Within his own title, his combative adventures belong to the mythos of drama, while the Thing's belong to the mythos of adventure.

When the two are joined in a team-up, it is the Thing's adventure-mythos that dominates, though this is in no way an inevitable development.

Their differing mythoi determines one aspect of each character's "grasp," even though, as their clash makes clear, they share the same *reach* of their dynamicity.  But their personas are a separate factor in terms of their *dynamis-statute.*  Swamp Thing, for instance, might be claimed by the Man-Thing's mythos of drama as well. But despite being another species of muck-monster, he bears closer relation to the Thing in being a generally "heroic monster," rather than a monster who does good due to contingent circumstances.  He has the grasp of a hero within the mythos of drama, while Man-Thing has the grasp appropriate to a monster in that same mythos-- so that the latter swamp-creature has less in common with Swamp Thing than with Doctor Frankenstein.